Remember how we were all like, “Man, what are these Republicans gonna do when their party fractures in the face of Trump’s electoral evisceration?!”
Yeah.
So the question to my mind is: Is the party actually ready to torch the DLC triangulation nonsense that has served it so poorly? Are the Amy Klobuchars of the world needing to start watching their backs?
Probably not. It’s probably just a boot stomping on a human face, forever.
.#AMERICA
We need to force the issue, even if it means Kanye West 2020. Hillary lost this election, and she was the hand-picked choice of the DLC and DNC.
Angry Joe has had a really good twitch stream about it. Basically he puts the blame on the DNC and Clinton and he isn’t wrong.
All you center-right motherfuckers harshing my nonexistent mellow right now ;)
I’m a slow drinker. I haven’t had much booze in the last decade, so eventually I’ll hopefully reach some sort of alcohol nirvana soon.
I drank a lot of whiskey and I just got sadder. Which was the plan, so mission accomplished. What are we taking about again?
I would have preferred Biden but hey, hindsight is 20/20 eh, Dem politicos?
Biden would have been a pretty good antidote to Trump. Shame about that.
Uneducated foreigner ramblings here, but I’m looking at the PEC map (I was also looking for 538’s map, but it seems to have disappeared from their front page) compared to the real one to figure out where the models failed, and it looks like the biggest upsets were WI, MI and PA going red. If they go Blue I think you get a winning map for the Dems regardless of Florida, Ohio etc.
Based on the current data Trump had a 1% lead in WI (about 27,000 votes), 0.3% in MI (16,000 votes) and 1.1% in PA (67,000 votes).
I’m a Brit, so I don’t know much about the characters of these states, but is there anything connecting them that could collectively lead the polling and modelling to get them so especially wrong?
Kanye? No way in hell. Kim 2020! Now that’s a first female presidential candidate!
Lots of working-class white voters- who were union Dems before the unions got busted by Reagan and globalization.
Those folks have been big losers since the end of the Cold War- so they figure Trump couldn’t be worse. Most of them would have voted for Bernie, and did in the primaries.
I say this as someone who demographically fits right in that wheelhouse even though I supported Hillary reluctantly.
Yeah, in addition to the very real consequences of decades of the Big Lie from right-wing media, which in many ways simply continued the age-old tradition of divide and conquer that worked so well to keep poor Americans from uniting and realizing their common circumstances, and hence to opposing the elites, you have to lay the smack down on the Democratic party, which went from a coalition that united precisely those working Americans in the heartland with elite progressive technocrats in the cities to an insular, arrogant cabal of just the technical intelligentisia that believed things like globalization, demographic change, and shifting social mores were inevitable (this was correct) and hence there was no need for the party to reach out and mitigate the impact of these shifts on the people least able or willing to accept them (this was a fatal flaw). Hence, what I always said about Clinton; her biggest flaw was her hubris. Not so much just personal, but as a representation of the collective arrogance of the Democratic elite.
Look at the blue part of the map. It’s the periphery, made up of the educated, successful, worldly, and secular, people who have by and large benefited from or at the very least made their peace with all of the forces of the modern or post-modern world. It’s about half the population of the country. The rest of the nation, the red parts, are in the heartland, the “fly-over country.” That very moniker speaks volumes. These are the folks the Dems basically shafted, in a different but no less thorough way than the GOP. The GOP exploited them as a low-wage labor source, a tool to support rampant development and profit taking, and an army of angry people motivated by social issues but used for the economic benefit of a very few. The Dems simply ignored them, and in the process, often humiliated, dismissed, and mocked them. No one bothered to try to help folks figure out how to reconcile the inevitable (and I believe just and good) changes in the social landscape, as we become a more diverse society and begin to recognize the necessity to let ancient frameworks on things like gender identity slip away. The Dems simply said, “this is what the future is, deal with it.” The GOP made sure there was no funding for education or training or any way out of the muck, because the last thing they wanted was an educated, informed, and economically successful mid-America, as that would inevitably erode any support for their very post-Eisenhower Republicanism. The Dems again blamed the victim.
The real problem we face is not what Trump will do, it’s what we as a country will do. How can we reconcile two halves of a nation that are so much at odds? Are we at an 1860 point, with the liberal intelligentsia ironically reprising the roles of the slave-holding South? Or are we on the brink of demographic and economic shifts that will help us resolve the crisis peacefully? There’s virtually zero Trump can do to make good his promises to the heartland. There is no way to turn back globalization, no way to single-handedly redo trade deals, no way to wave a wand and defeat terrorism. So the people who put him in office, too, are in store for a rude awaking down the road. The only people who are going to “win” are the mendacious rich who will try to turn Trump into our century’s version of Warren G. Harding.
Again ironically, universal health care, guaranteed basic income, state-supported higher education, and government investment in infrastructure–all things the GOP and mainstream Dems have opposed–would be exactly the ticket to work us out of this crisis…
I agree. I don’t fault the middle Americans for not wanting Hilary one bit…but I really wish we had gone Bernie instead of Trump for that change.
Sadly I fear that fear and hate are far better motivators of humanity than reason and hope.
Centrist Neoliberalism has failed. The world needs a resurgence of the populist left to offer a radical counterpoint to what’s going on right now.
Glorious Penbladian Socialist Utopia 2020
Penblade 2020, I’m in!
Do not worry, comrade. When Glorious Penbladian Utopia come, all will be. . . “in.”
Goddammit, I really wish I could grow a mustache worth a shit right now, because I’d be twirling the fuck out of it.
I call dibs on either VP or Secretary of Transportation so I can fire the FAA chiefs day 1.
Recall, the Whig party was not really ended by a loss, but by a victory.
I fault the Democrats for this. At the end of the day, you can’t just know you are right, you have to convince people of it.
Clinton was a terrible candidate, as history has just proven. “Don’t vote for me, vote against the other person” does not work. “Vote for the first female president” does not work. You need to actually give people a reason to vote for the actual person running and “it is my turn in line” is just not enough.
Democrats saw that the wind was blowing against them and decided to piss against the wind anyway with the expected result.